I'd Know You Anywhere

by Laura Lippman

  But this was the first time they had gone over the day in such detail. They had been talking for hours, and Elizabeth, now known as Eliza, was tired.

  “Not exactly sorry. But I understood what was going on inside his head.”

  “Then you must have felt even worse for Holly.” The young lawyer was nodding, encouraging her. “Because you knew exactly what she was going through.”

  “Yes,” she said, wanting to please him. Then, after a quick glance to her parents, “No.”

  “You didn’t feel bad for Holly.” Repeated in a flat tone, as if that would make her aware of how ridiculous she was. “You didn’t understand what was happening to her.”

  “I didn’t know what she was thinking. I didn’t know her.”

  “But she started to cry. And you knew what you felt when Walter took you.”

  “Yes, but—”

  The prosecutor cut her off. “That’s all you have to say. That she was crying, that she seemed upset, that she realized things had taken a bad turn. You see, Elizabeth”—in court, she would still be Elizabeth—“the details that matter are the ones that show Walter kidnapped Holly and took the contents of the cash box. So let’s just focus on that. He didn’t let her go when she asked, right?”

  “Right.” Holly was pretty even when she cried. Mister, mister. Please just let me go, mister. My daddy will pay you, mister.

  “And he took her money?”

  “He asked for it and she gave it to him.”

  “But this was after she had asked to be let go, right? How much time had passed?”

  “An hour? Maybe more, maybe less. The clock in the truck was broken. Walter always said the cobbler’s children went barefoot and a mechanic’s car was never as nice as the ones he worked on.”

  The prosecutor showed no interest in Walter’s insights.

  “So he takes Holly’s money.”

  “Yes, to buy us hamburgers.”

  “Right. Still, it was Holly’s money and Walter took it from her. By force.”

  “Yes, I guess so. I mean, he took the box from her and she didn’t want to give it up. He didn’t have to fight her or anything, but he did have to kind of peel it out of her arms.”

  The prosecutor nodded. “Right, he took the money and then—?”

  “He gave it to me and sent me into the McDonald’s to buy the food because he didn’t trust Holly to behave if we went through the drive-through lane.”

  The silence that filled the room reminded Eliza/Elizabeth of a verse they had sung in middle school chorus, the Robert Frost poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” This silence, like the one in the poem, was dark and deep. Not lovely, though, definitely not lovely, anything but lovely. She heard, literally heard, her mother swallow. Heard—not saw, but heard—her father take her mother’s hand, the tiny intake of breath made by the prosecutor. She could suddenly hear everything. The hum of the fluorescent light, the water cooler gently burping out in the hallway, her own hands moving back and forth along the thighs of her black cotton pants. Brushed cotton twill, pleated, worn with a high-necked shirt fastened with a brooch, an outfit modeled after one she had seen in a movie.

  “Could you repeat that, Elizabeth?”

  “He gave me the money and sent me into McDonald’s to buy the food.” She was proud of how consistent she was, how she said it, word for word, almost exactly as she had said it before. That was very important in these things. But the prosecutor did not seem proud of her.

  “And you—”

  “I ordered three Quarter Pounders. Walter didn’t like pickles, so I had to wait for his to be made special. And I had to make sure I knew which were the Diet Cokes and which was the regular Coke. Walter drank regular Coke, but he thought girls should drink Diet Coke because soda can make you fat if you’re not careful. We just guessed that Holly would eat the same things we did, because she wouldn’t say what she wanted. And I had to make sure to get enough ketchup packages. They never give you enough, only two little measly ones, and they can be grudging if you don’t ask right.”

  “Grudging?”

  “That was Walter’s word, I guess. I took it back to the car and we drove a little ways until we found a place where we could eat, hoping the fries didn’t get cold. Holly didn’t want to eat hers, though, so Walter did, picking out the pickles. I don’t know why he couldn’t do that with his own sandwich to begin with.”

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Yes?”

  “When you went into the McDonald’s—why didn’t you tell someone what was happening?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That you were kidnapped, that your kidnapper had another girl in the car?”

  No one had asked her this before, but then—no one had gone over this part of the day in such detail. When she was rescued, the questions had been quick, mercifully so. How was she? What had he done to her? Had he—? She was the one who told them about Holly, the scream in the night, the campsite in the mountains, the landmarks that she could remember. And for weeks, months, that had been enough. But now they were preparing for Walter’s trial and everything—everything—had to be discussed in great detail. She had to tell the story the same way, in her own words. She thought she was doing that.

  She had forgotten the Quarter Pounders.

  “I couldn’t. He said he would hurt me.”

  “But he was in the car. With Holly.”

  “Yes, because she couldn’t be trusted.”

  “And you could?”

  “When I was good, he was nicer to me.” She looked to her parents. Her mother nodded, encouraging her, although she looked slightly stunned. Her father looked angry, but not at her. He was glaring at the prosecutor.

  “How did you earn Walter’s trust?” the prosecutor asked, and her parents could no longer contain themselves.

  “Really—” her mother began. “Why must you—” her father said, trying to use what Eliza recognized was his professional voice, but not quite controlling it as he usually did.

  “What do you think Walter Bowman’s lawyer is going to do with this information?” The prosecutor’s manner was bland, like one of the jocks at Eliza’s new school, the kind of boy who lets a girl know she wasn’t even worth teasing. “She had a chance to get away, to save both of them. She didn’t.”

  “So don’t put her on the stand at all,” her father said. “You’ll get no argument from us.”

  “I need her testimony about the cash box, and how Walter refused to let Holly go. I have to establish the kidnapping or another felony to ensure he gets the death penalty, and we can’t prove rape.”

  Eliza pondered that, then realized: He meant Holly. They couldn’t prove Walter raped Holly. What he had done to her didn’t count.

  “Eliza’s behavior is consistent with dozens of hostage cases,” her mother began.

  “Stockholm syndrome, I know.” The prosecutor’s voice was bitter, belittling. “That worked so well for Patty Hearst.”

  “No, not Stockholm syndrome, not exactly. She didn’t sympathize with her captor. But Elizabeth”—her mother had trouble remembering the new name—“is a young girl and she believed he had the power he claimed he had. He threatened her. He threatened us.”

  The prosecutor looked to Eliza. She nodded, then realized he would not be satisfied with a nod. “He told me all the time that he would kill me and my family if I tried to get away from him. He said he would kill them while I watched.”

  He looked down at his notes. “Back at the roadside, where you first met Holly—why did you get out of the truck and let her sit in the middle?”

  “Because that’s what Walter wanted.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “No, but I understood. He gave me a look, and I realized that he wanted the new girl to sit next to him.”

  “The new girl?”

  “Holly. But she wasn’t Holly yet. I didn’t learn her name until she was in the truck.”

  “You were the new girl, onc
e.”

  Eliza didn’t understand his point. “Not really. There wasn’t another girl, when he took me.”

  “You saw him with a shovel, digging a grave.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know that. I just saw a man digging.”

  “A grave for Maude Parrish.”

  “That’s who you found there, right?”

  The prosecutor didn’t always answer her questions. Apparently, he owned the questions. “So you were the new girl, after Maude. And you knew that when Walter switched girls, he got rid of the old one.”

  “No…” It was different, not at all the same.

  “Elizabeth, why do you think Walter kept you alive? Why did he kill every girl but you?”

  “I think,” she said, “it was because I always did what he told me to do.”

  The prosecutor asked her to leave, so he could speak to her parents privately, but her parents refused. She was sixteen, she was going to testify in court. She should be part of every discussion.

  “Okay, I’m going to lay it out for you. The prosecutor in Maryland is scared to go for the death penalty in his county, precisely because he has no evidence that Maude was kidnapped. Walter Bowman refuses to confess to any other homicides, although there are quite a few missing person cases that seem plausible. The murder of Holly Tackett is our only chance to put this guy to death, and I can’t afford to give the defense anything to play with.”

  The Lerners were united in their mystification, staring at this young, pompous man in bewilderment.

  “A smart defense attorney is going to go to town with this. Suggest Elizabeth wasn’t a victim at this point, but an accomplice. And once you let that idea worm its way into the courtroom, you’ve got all sorts of reasonable doubt. What if Elizabeth was the one who pushed Holly into the ravine, out of fear, or even jealousy? What if Elizabeth was really Walter’s girlfriend?”

  “That is offensive beyond belief,” Inez said.

  “A good attorney isn’t going to worry about giving offense. He’ll be playing for big stakes. He’s playing for Walter’s life.”

  “And you’re playing,” Manny said, “for his death. That’s quite a game you’ve got going there. Some would call it playing God.”

  The prosecutor studied Eliza’s parents. “You’re enlightened types, right? Don’t want to see the guy die. Don’t want to see anyone die. But then, you’ve got your daughter. Two other families, probably a lot more, weren’t so lucky.”

  “As a father,” Manny said, “I want to strangle him. When I see him, I want to go over to him and pound his face off, knock him to the ground, kick him until he coughs up blood. But I know that’s not right, and I shouldn’t do it. Nor would I have the state do it for me, by proxy. So, no, I don’t believe in the death penalty, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “The Tacketts don’t feel the same way. Fact is, that’s who the commonwealth of Virginia represents in this case. Not your daughter. Holly Tackett and Virginia. I hope you haven’t let your own”—he paused for a minute, seeming not so much to search for a word, as for the spin he wanted to place on it—“altruistic ideas influence your daughter. I hope this story about McDonald’s, which I’m hearing for the first time, isn’t something you’ve cooked up to create enough confusion about events that a jury will be reluctant to consider the death penalty.”

  Inez put a hand on Manny’s arm, almost as if she feared he would try to do to the prosecutor the things he said he wanted to do to Walter. But, of course, he stayed in his chair.

  “The only thing we’ve instructed our daughter to do,” Inez said, “is tell the truth. Tell the truth, and not look for reasons this happened to her, because there are no reasons.”

  “That’s a nice thing to tell your daughter and probably very helpful,” the prosecutor said, trying to scoot back to their side, reunite the team. Yea, Eliza! Boo, Walter! Only he had slipped, revealed his true loyalties, and Eliza knew she could never trust him again. “But jurors will want reasons. I’m trying to anticipate the worst-case scenario. I’m sure things will work out.”

  Things did, at least as far as the prosecutor was concerned. Walter’s defense attorney was far from expert, and he treated Eliza with an almost bizarre politeness, as if she had a condition that should not be referenced directly. No, it was the prosecutor who asked her about the trip to McDonald’s, and made her tell, in excruciating detail, what Walter did to her the night after Holly died. It was Jared Garrett, a few months later, who devoted a large section of his book to the theory that Elizabeth Lerner might have been Walter Bowman’s girlfriend and coconspirator, whom he decided not to implicate for reasons known only to him, given that he never testified. If Elizabeth had been raped, why was Walter allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of kidnapping and assault? Garrett cited no sources for his theories, asserting only that there was a “school of thought” that Elizabeth Lerner may have evolved into something more than a hostage. “School of thought!” Vonnie had snorted. “There’s only one student in that school and he’s the village idiot.”

  It didn’t matter. By the time Garrett’s book was published, the sordid imaginations attracted to his kind of journalism had moved on. A serial killer known as the Night Stalker was terrorizing Los Angeles; two dead girls in the Mid-Atlantic simply couldn’t compete. The crimes of Walter Bowman had been eclipsed even in Virginia, where a high-achieving college student had enlisted her German boyfriend in the murder of her parents. Elizabeth Lerner was Eliza Lerner, enrolled in a new high school in a new county, her hair back to its natural color and curly disorder. Nobody knew her past, nobody cared.

  OR WAS IT THE OTHER WAY around: nobody cared, so nobody knew? Sitting at her kitchen table more than two decades later, Eliza found herself taunted by that question. Was it so unthinkable that Walter Bowman might have chosen her over Holly? She knew what her parents would say: Walter was mentally ill, incapable of any genuine feeling. Walter was a sociopath. Walter had not chosen anyone.

  Yet he had, and only he knew why. Whatever he wanted now—and she had known from the first letter that he would not be satisfied with a one-sided contact, that his very words “I’d know you anywhere” were meant to remind her of a marker on a very old debt—she wanted something from him, too. She needed to ask: “Why me?” Was that wrong? Was it ego-driven, irrational? Did the very question desecrate the memories of the others, and if that was the case—then so what? Wasn’t she entitled to ask that question, in private, of the one person who actually could tell her if there was a reason she was alive?

  But if she dared to ask Walter that question, she had to be prepared for other answers, less pleasant ones. She had to confront the fact of the girl who walked into McDonald’s, focused on nothing but ketchup and pickles. She had to think about what happened later that night. “We have to go,” he’d said, and they went, breaking camp in silence. As they drove down the long switchback in the dark, he handed her Holly’s metal box, now empty, all those well-intentioned dollars gone, some for food, the rest crammed into Walter’s pocket. “Toss it,” he said, grunting with disapproval at how ineptly she hurled the box from the truck. “You can’t throw for shit.” It was rare for him to use profanity, and the word felt like a slap.

  The box was found a few days later, helping searchers pinpoint the campsite that Elizabeth had described for them, and then Holly’s broken body on the other side of the mountain. Elizabeth was praised for being cagey enough to let this potent clue fall close to the roadside.

  But perhaps Walter had it right: She just couldn’t throw for shit.

  Part II

  CARELESS WHISPER

  Released 1985

  Reached no. 1 on Billboard Hot 100 on February 16, 1985

  Spent 22 weeks on Billboard Hot 100

  21

  THE NEW PHONE SAT in the alcove off the master bedroom on an end table rescued from her parents’ basement. Eliza had been shocked at how much resistance the local phone company had given her about adding a seco
nd, dedicated line to the house, but perhaps that was because she wanted the most basic package possible, with no extras and a limited number of outgoing calls a month. Why not get a cell phone? the helpful young woman at Verizon had queried. Or just use your call-waiting feature? Why indeed? She could get a cheap, disposable mobile, toss it when—well, whenever. She knew that what she wanted wasn’t exactly logical, but it made sense to her. She wanted to limit Walter’s access to her, her home, to one slender wire, one no-frills touch-tone telephone. It was bad enough that he was the one who called her, and collect at that. She could at least pick the instrument and set the time frame for when he was allowed to call, ten to two weekdays, when the house was empty.

  The children had been curious about the new phone, drawn to it as children are drawn to any novelty, but its lack of features quickly dampened their interest. They had been told that this was an outgoing line for emergencies only. Peter had gilded the lily by claiming Homeland Security recommended Washington-area residents have old-fashioned desk phones, ones that did not require electrical outlets. Unfortunately, this inspired falsehood inflamed Albie’s imagination, and there was another round of nightmares. Eliza was exhausted in a way she had not been since Iso was a colicky infant, moving through the days under the fog of a constant headache.

  Yet the telephone remained silent. There was, apparently, not a little bureaucracy involved in talking to a man on death row. For every rule that Eliza had invented—the dedicated line, the hours during which Walter was allowed to call—the Department of Corrections had far more. Or so Barbara LaFortuny informed them when she had taken the new number and forwarded it to Walter. It was a week since they had installed the phone, and it had rung exactly once, sending its full-chested sound through the house.

  It was an automated service, claiming that her car warranty was about to expire.